Nexus Newsletter February 2019

January was an extremely busy month, culminating in the release of the open source code for Tritium. An additional 58,627 lines of code have been written since the end of last October. Meanwhile, the UK and Australian Embassies have continued to develop their outreach in their respective regions. All three Embassies have provided an update of their recent progress.

US Embassy

On the 8th of January Colin spoke at CES Las Vegas on the topic of “How blockchain is remaking the Media/Entertainment Business”.

On the 31st of January, the team released the source code for Tritium. Colin published the next update of the TAO series explaining what the code contains and what you are currently able to do with it.

We have been hard at work preparing the Tritium Daemon ready for full release out of public beta testing. Our current data shows incredible optimizations with memory usage at 90 MB, syncing from scratch on Linux at just over 1.25 hours, and syncing on a Mac laptop at 3.5 hours from genesis. This is a drastic improvement from the current legacy synchronization which requires 30 hours or more.

Interface update

The source code and public beta of the Tritium 0.8.7 Interface has been released which still contains legacy cores. The devs are busy making a branch called ‘TritiumCores` which will contain the WIP for tritium cores.

We are getting ready to integrate the interface with a Tritium daemon for all the features Tritium beta has to offer: fast synchronization, instant loading, wallet stability and minimum hardware requirements.

The API, as it stand contains three main interfaces, namely Account, LISP, and Supply Chain. Each of these are tailored for industry specific applications, such as supply chain management, account verification and integration services for existing systems. As the API deployment continues, we will keep you up to date with new APIs that are ready for operation. Over the forthcoming weeks, we will continue to add more API calls and validation scripts as we get the testnet ready for deployment. If you would like to contribute to development, please make sure to submit pull requests and begin discussions on github.

The Three Pillars

The technology of Nexus is a cornerstone to the development of the community and business adoption. We believe technology, community and enterprise form the three pillars of Nexus, and thus we are happy to see the technology advancing steadily, making strides that have become important for adoption and ease of use.

“Community is the foundation to the growth of Nexus, and the technology and adoption is what supports this.”

Community Contributions

We would like to give a special thank you to Shea for writing a simplified version of the last TAO update.

Through our membership with TechUK we have attended/are due to attend a variety of events throughout February:

– Australian-UK Fintech Reception at the Australian High Commission

– TechUK Digital ID Paper launch in Houses of Parliament

– IoT Secure by Design

– Future of Payments in the UK

– DLT Working Group

The DLT working group is of a particular interest, as we have co-written a UK Blockchain White Paper with TechUK and other influential members, due to be published later this year. This paper will be distributed to the 900 businesses who are TechUK members, and will be presented to the UK government with the aim to help encourage blockchain adoption throughout the UK.

PR

Through the efforts of our UK PR agency Nexus was mentioned in the Independent, the Financial Times (both national news outlets) and Yahoo Finance (International) in December of 2018. To be mentioned in such news sources improves our credibility within the digital currency space.

As always, we continue to take a number of business development related meetings.

AUS Embassy

Since its launch in late November, the Australian Embassy has been working hard to set the foundations for a busy 2019. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) were engaged to assist in the establishment of the business entities and advise on the correct tax framework. They found that the tax treatment of the Ambassador keys did not fit within any of the current Australian Taxation Office (ATO) tax guidelines relating to cryptocurrencies, so this process continues. On the back of these discussions, Paul has been invited to join the Australian Chamber of Digital Commerce (ADCA) Tax Working Group, which directly advises the ATO on tax legislation.

The Embassy has been actively looking for a marketing and PR agency within the Australian and Asia-Pacific regions and several candidates have been found. Most recently we met with the Chief Editor of the new Blockchain Australia magazine, which circulates in the Australian Financial Review. These agencies will expose Nexus to industry leaders and key decision makers through specific publications and articles.

The Embassy has been attending the monthly ‘Crypto Sydney – Intelligence Traded’ networking events developing some great contacts.

If you would like to join the guys in Sydney you can sign up to the event here.

We are planning to have a presence at the ADC Global Blockchain Summit in Adelaide this March, as well as the APAC Blockchain Conference in Sydney in June, the largest blockchain event in the Asia Pacific region, to meet with high profile businesses and explore potential use cases for Nexus.

Paul joined the development team in November and has hit the ground running, working alongside the other developers around the globe to complete the Tritium core. The recent downturn in NXS price has curtailed our plans to expand the development team within the Australian Embassy, but we are confident to get our plans back on track later in the year. Nicco and Mike continue to work as volunteer directors.

We would like to give a big thank you to all the dev team for their hard work and our community for their continued support, and look forward to all your feedback from the forthcoming testing of Tritium.

Upcoming Events

Prague Workshop

Dino and Colin will be at the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) in Prague in the last week of March. We will be organising a workshop on the afternoon of the 29th and the 30th. We will confirm the location of the venue at a later date on social media. We hope to meet many of you there.